4 ms·
What happens when Android starts clamping down, as they have? Android ever more ratchets shit down, and more and more essential apps like Termux simply can't ma
by rektide 4y ago
What happens when Android starts clamping down, as they have? Android ever more ratchets shit down, and more and more essential apps like Termux simply can't make it through the Google gauntlet. What happens if Android stops allowing sideloading?
I hear this defense a lot from the anti-sideloaders, that it's fine that this platform have no freedom, because there's another popular platform with some freedom. Even with the DJI example here before us (which so far has been icky but had no known actual bad consequences), I roundly do not get the argument, do not see the appeal of being trapped, of arguing everyone else on this platform needs to be under the fist of Cook & every government on the planet & without feet to stand on.
And it's repugnant to me that the defense is that there is one other platform where freedom exists, as if it's OK that one set of folks fall down the slippery slide & leave the rest of humanity tottering for themselves, trying to keep feet under them against perpetual universal software helplessness.
Apple has basically been winning the AT&T position against Carterphone. They've used monopoly power to control push around dominate & extract, to make up whatever terms it wants for the world. That's a position that damned & binds humanity, and one we have rejected already quite clearly, but now that computers are involved it's free game to coral the humans & other entities & to rollback the Carterphone right to modify the world about you.
There's one plan I'm OK with here, which is Apple can keep it's closed platform but has to let other OS run on iPhone & make equal use of the hardware. If apple demands control over iOS, I think that's an alternative out for hardware owners.
- yreg 4y ago>There's one plan I'm OK with here, which is Apple can keep it's closed platform but has to let other OS run on iPhone & make equal use of the hardware. This is an interesting idea. It sounds pretty good actually.
- a-user-you-like 4y agoIt hasn’t yet, but if they do there are already alternatives in the Android world. That might the chance that Microsoft, Amazon, Epic, or any other company might take to launch a phone that allows sideloading.